Basic Character Creation & Development

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Basic Character Creation & Development
By ryokomon of the RPG-Directory.

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[/ul]The creation of a character can come in many different ways for different people. Some people think of a name first and move from there, others think of an appearance or personality first, then flesh out the rest and others might figure out an entire character just by looking at a cool, random object. Hopefully this guide will help all of those sorts of people regardless, if not to create a character, then to help flesh him or her out a little.

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[/ul]Rather than jumping straight into the deeper aspects of a character like personality or background, we’ll start with the easy stuff – the basics, like name, age and gender.

Name: Name can be a pretty important part of your character; it may even lend a hand making their personality (a guy with a really feminine name might’ve had a hard time growing up and begin bitter, for example, or he might be known by a nickname instead). You need to make sure that it fits with the setting, too. A character in a high school role play is not going to be called Xagroth the Destroyer, nor is a character in a medieval fantasy likely to be walking around with the name Ryan Smith or IG-108. If you can’t think of a good name on your own, try checking out a name generator or baby name sites.

Age: Age should also be relevant to the setting and also your character’s personality, though we’ll be deciding on that later. If you’re trying to create a character to fulfil a certain role for example, like a knight, the character wouldn’t be a 10 year old kid or a 90 year old. If the plot says that all of the children in the role play were killed in some way, you shouldn’t rp one then either unless you’ve clarified it with the role play’s creator. Age too can lend a hand to personality – a kid would be a lot more naive than a teenager, who might be more hot headed and reckless than an experienced adult.

Gender: Again, make sure gender is fitting of the setting and the role you want to fill and be mindful of the effects it may have on your character’s personality and background. If you’re role playing in an Amazon tribe, you wouldn’t be playing a guy, for example. This is pretty self explanatory though.

Got that out of the way? Great. Now we can move on to...

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[/ul]Now that we have our simple stuff, we can start to add more too our character and make something of them. I find that the best thing to do at this stage is get a rough idea of what you want their personality to be like, and then work on their appearance afterwards since appearance can (but isn’t always) influenced by personality.

Getting that basic idea can be done in a number of different ways. You might just think of a few words or titles that would work well, for example:

• Weary knight
  
  
• Seedy barkeep
  
  
• Damsel in distress
  
  
• Brainless ruffian
  
  
• Optimistic peasant
  
  
• Bitter widower
  
  
• Whimsical farmer’s daughter
  
  
• Reckless rapscallion
  
  
• Indifferent mercenary
  
  
• Dutiful wife
  

All I’ve done there is just slapped an adjective on a noun of some kind, like a rank or whatever, and already ideas can begin forming for each one of them. The brainless ruffian quickly becomes someone who’s only really skill is punching or following orders, and he might be his best friend’s lacky. The reckless rapscallion becomes a devilishly charming young man who’s only out for himself and a good time and an adventure or two, and the indifferent mercenary becomes a emotionally detached gun-for-hire who never gets involved with anything for his own good. Gigantic, leafy trees grow from the smallest of seeds, yo.

Now that you’ve got that title, you can do the same as I just did and make a short sentence or a couple of sentences about them.

With that short personality under our belts, we can start to think about what might be an appropriate (or even appropriately inappropriate) physical appearance for them. We only need bits and bobs here, nothing fancy or detailed. You might decide that your ‘reckless rapscallion’ is a fairly tall, robust guy with scruffy brown hair and near constant 5 o’clock shadow. The scruffiness and stubble fits the initial idea, so it’s not a bad choice. Getting a brief idea of build and height, hair, initial looks (e.g. youthful, impish, handsome, fugly) is the best way to start yourself off on your appearance.

By now we should have a name, age, gender and the bare bones of a personality and physical appearance. Next we can work on fleshing out that personality a little more so that we can then work on our background. Some people prefer to do it the other way around, but hey, this is the way I’m used to so I’m sorry!

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[/ul]Now then. Hopefully you’ve got the framework of your character and we can start filling in the blanks. With these simple details, we can start making more of it. I like to start by sorting out two lists – one of the characters positive points and how they might be on a good day when everything’s sunshine and happiness, and one on a bad day when they might be generally unhappy or just having a crap time of things. By doing this, we not only get a long list of aspects of their personality when we join the two together, but we get a list with a nice amount of flaws too. Characters with perfect personalities and no flaws tend to be fairly hollow and 2D, and that’s not what we want.

Here are some examples of things that could go in each list – some of them even apply to both.

Good Day
Energetic
Cheerful
Optimistic
Intelligent
Cunning
Gentle
Sensitive
Steadfast
Brave
Confident
Industrious
Charming
Decisive
Eager
Trustworthy
Tough

Bad Day
Narcissistic
Selfish
Rude
Aloof
Grumpy
Uptight
Deceitful
Domineering
Violent
Tough
Unintelligent
Cynical
Lazy
Thoughtless
Thick-skinned
Careless

Once we’ve figured this out, we can move onto the ‘whys’ and the character’s background and past.

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[/ul]These are an important part of character development, though I personally hate writing up character histories.

The simple background formula I use is:
Life before/at conception (Were they planned? Rape? Happy families?)
Life at birth/as a baby. (How were they treated? What were their parents like? Any other siblings?)
Childhood. (Were they bullied? How were they raised? Were they in any accidents? Did they learn any important lessons?)
Teenage Years. (Similar to childhood. Did they have a first love? Were they enlisted into the army with or without their own choice?)
Adulthood. (etc.)
And so on depending on how old your character is. Significant events and insignificant events are both good in a background, though the ones significant to the character are likely to affect their personalities a lot. The things we do in our lives, even out own simple rl lives, can contribute to how we are now. Here are a few simple real life examples of just how much our own backgrounds can affect us:

• A character who’s an only child could grow up to be very spoilt.
  
  
• A character who’s a younger sibling could grow up to be very competitive and feel easily unappreciated.
  
  
• A character whose father walked out on them at some stage could grow up to be distrustful of others.
  
  
• A character who moved around and travelled a lot could grow to become very adaptable.
  
  
• A character with a family who made loads of life mistakes could learn from those and be very level-headed themselves.
  
  
• A character who practically had to bring himself up could grow to be very self-reliant and independent.
  

As you can see, little things like whether or not your character had brothers and sisters can actually have an impact on how the behave later on. It’s worth considering all these things when forming your background. You’ve already picked your basic personality lists, and the background is where you start to think about why these things might be.

Why is your character arrogant? He might’ve had a lot of praise from parents or succeed at almost everything he does.
Why does your character always do as he’s told? He might’ve been brought up under a strict household or served in the military.
Why is your character unnecessarily forgiving? Perhaps they themselves were forgiven for something terrible they’d done and feel they owe it to the world.
Why is your character so unpredictable and violent? He might’ve been brought up around fighting or even been raised that way.

These are all only examples, but you get the idea. More often than not, it’s the characters who’re angsty for the sake of it or the character who hates talking to people for no reason other than ‘because he doesn’t like people’ who are very uninteresting and underdeveloped characters. Everything has a reason, especially things like emotional problems (e.g. angst or seething hatreds). Not coming up with a reason for those emotional problems is practically branding you and your character as a classic attention-seeking emo kid.

One thing you should obviously be aware of when constructing a background is making it plausible. Role players who try too hard to make their character’s histories (and even appearances and personalities) unique, whether this is by making them a blood thirsty psychopath who burnt down an orphanage or by saying that they don’t trust people because they were sexually abused by their parents and brother and sister and aunt and uncle and boyfriend, will often lose all credibility in role plays. Things need to be believable, not so outrageous and whacked out that people think ‘... riiiight’ when they read it, but that doesn’t mean that you have to have a plain old boring background either. Find a happy medium!

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[/ul]One thing you have to remember when writing an appearance and thinking it up is that people aren’t really the flawless celebrities we see in the media. Even the beautiful, popular kids at a high school have their flaws, whether it’s a mole on Mary Ann’s otherwise perfect face or the bags under Jack’s eyes from staying up too late. Real people are not flawless (UK) size 8, airbrushed beauties, and that’s what a lot of people seem to make the mistake of doing when making characters. Perfect appearances often go hand in hand with the perfect personality or unrealistic background.

I’m not saying that characters can’t be beautiful of course, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is more to every single person than the way they look.

Anywho, we already have the basic idea of what we want our character to look like, but it’s time to begin fleshing it out similarly to how we did the personality and background. Head-to-toe descriptions aren’t the best way to write them, but it’s easier for a beginner or just for the ideas to analyse a character’s looks that way.

Head (What’s their hair like? Eyes? Face?)
Torso (Do they have broad shoulders? Deep chest? Big boobs? Are they really slim/chunky/fat?)
Waist (Wide hips?)
Legs (Long legs? Thick, powerful legs? Thin legs?)
There’s obviously more to it than what I wrote there in brackets, but you get the idea.

A very important thing to realise when thinking about your character’s appearance is that there is a lot more to the way someone looks than just their hair colour and all of those things. We can learn a lot from just studying a person’s outward appearance, for example:

• Do they slouch, or stand nice and upright?
  
  
• Do they stare straight ahead or at the floor?
  
  
• Do they seem as though they know where they’re going or do they always seem lost?
  
  
• How do they dress?
  
  
• Do they look clean and polished, or scruffy?
  
  
• Do they have any noticeable scars or markings?
  
  
• Are there certain things that they’re almost always seen with? (e.g. a certain necklace, or even earphones in their ears)
  
  
• Do they smile often?
  
  
• Are their faces or eyes very emotive?
  
  
• Do they often use hand or body gestures? How often?
  

All of these different things and more can reflect the character’s personality in the way they look. Someone who slouches and stares at the ground is likely to be lazier or at least more self-conscious than someone who stands upright and looks straight ahead. Someone with scars might be very self-conscious of them or even proud of them because they’re a token of a victory or a mark of a mistake. Someone who smiles and uses exaggerated hand gestures might be a very happy and eccentric person, whereas someone who rarely smiles and sneers instead might be cold and spiteful. We can learn a lot about people, or at least make assumptions about them, from these kinds of things and so it’s worth considering them when developing your character.

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[/ul]We already have pretty much everything covered by now, even if only in a summarised form, but the last little thing that I always find fun to do are miscellaneous extras. These are sorts of things that aren’t necessary at all, but they’re enjoyable, for me at least, because they help me learn more about my character and the sort of things they might like.

Some things to consider are:

• Do they have a star sign? Which one would fit them best?
  
  
• What’s their blood type, or which would fit them best?
  
  
• Do they have any favourite items, or are there any items that you attribute them to?
  
  
• Do they have a theme song? What is it and why?
  
  
• Do they have any embarrassing memories?
  
  
• Are they allergic to any kinds of food? What foods do they love/hate?
  
  
• Do they have any (ir)rational fears?
  
  
• Are they religious?
  
  
• What would their ideal, perfect birthday cake be like?
  
  
• Do they have a certain political stance?
  
  
• And of course, what are their opinions on things going on with relation to the actual role play?
  

Insignificant though some may be, these kinds of things help to bring you closer to your character and give them further depth, but in a fun and silly kind of way. Not for everyone, but hey, the idea’s there for those who’re into it.

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[/ul]That pretty much concludes this character creation guide. From the simple seed of a random title or concept, we’ve fleshed out our character right until the very end where we figure out some random additions to make them seem more human. One thing you should think about though is that characters are subject to change as you role play them. The reckless guy from the beginning that I used as an example may grow to be more responsible and serious, and the Damsel in Distress might eventually learn to become more self-reliant and fend for herself. Like us real folks, characters are constantly changing and developing as time goes on – some might end up completely different to how you originally imagined them, but that’s half the fun of role playing.